3 founders spent a year building a Slackbot that makes sales jobs easier, and they raised $2.6 million from a who's who list of investors

Chat bots have become
hotly debated in tech: they’re the future, they’re dumb,
they’re convenient, they’re annoying, and so on.

Everyone has an opinion,
including prominently Facebook and Microsoft, who have declared
them a big part of the future, in one way or another. The idea
behind chat bots is simple: instead of maneuvering complicated
menus and interfaces, you text message a “bot” like you would a
customer service rep, and that bot gets stuff done for
you.

Many early consumer bots
for platforms like Facebook Messenger have proved a bit of a
disappointment. But
one place that bots have already been a success is in hot
work-chat program Slack, where they mainly serve to let people
easily recall bits of information without opening a new
program.

Your AI work
assistant

Troops believes chat bots
can make the the lives of salespeople much easier, by allowing
them to interact with an AI personal assistant that has access to
their whole pipeline in Salesforce.Troops

Dan Reich and Scott Britton saw the work potential of bots a
year ago, when they began building Troops, a startup they envision as
eventually becoming your artificial intelligence assistant for
work. Troops’ first product is a Slack bot that pulls CRM data
from Salesforce when you give it
commands. Salespeople, accounts people, and customer
success people can get the information they need without logging
into the Salesforce database and filling out fields. All they
have to do is type commands into Slack, which many organizations
are already using all day every day to communicate.

Reich, Britton, and third co-founder Greg Ratner, are
veterans of the New York tech industry with multiple $100+
million exits between them. Reich formerly co-founded Spinback,
which was
acquired by Buddy Media, where he stayed until Buddy Media
was acquired for about $800 million by Salesforce. Britton was
formerly part of SinglePlatform, a startup
that was acquired by Constant Contact for $100 million.
Ratner was previously Director of Technology at Deep
Focus. Despite their varying backgrounds, all of them are
true believers in the ability of chat bots to change the
industry.

“The next app stores, so to speak, will be messaging
platforms,” Britton says. But he says so far the enterprise
value of bots has been undersold. That’s where Troops comes
in.

And Britton and Reich are already looking for ways to
expand Troops' functionality beyond Slack.

“We’ve integrated with Google and email, and we have
customer information from your CRM,” Britton says. “Imagine a
world where you have an assistant helping you do your job. ‘I see
you had four meetings yesterday, with Nike and Coca-Cola. It’s
been 48 hours and you haven’t emailed them or followed up … And a
manager could set those parameters too.”

This will help both managers and sales reps, the founders
say. “Managers spend half their time playing zoo keeper and
babysitter, and the rep feels like an idiot for [forgetting
something and] not doing their job.” With Troops, the manager
just has to put in the parameters once, and the bot does the
rest.

The Business

Troops, which has been in stealth
mode until now, has raised $2.6 million in a seed round of
financing led by First Round Capital, including angels like
Square’s Gokul Rajaram, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg of Flatiron
Health, and Seamless co-founder Jason Finger.

But what's to stop
Salesforce or Slack from boxing out the young startup with its
own bot?

The founders say big companies
have a thousand priorities, and that there’s always something an
engineer at Salesforce could be doing that would more immediately
affect revenue. They also think both Slack and Salesforce will
appreciate the product.

“The more people use Troops, the
more they’re using Slack and Salesforce,” Britton says. “We’re
happy to build on the back of giants and just keep going.”

In the pilot, Troops tested their
bot with 70-80 companies, and they are now opening it up to
the public (though there is still an application process). The
plan is to give the product away to consumers first, and then add
a premium paid tier later.

And Slack is just the beginning
for Troops. The founders say porting Troops to other work-chat
programs like HipChat or Facebook’s new work product is part of
the grand plan.